Best Options Trading Blogs

Looking for reliable, up-to-date insights on options trading? Below you’ll find the best options trading blogs active in the past 12–24 months, hand-picked for depth of content, educational value, and consistency. Whether you’re a beginner searching for strategy basics or an advanced trader hunting for quantitative edge, these sites deliver.

How We Chose These Blogs

Fresh content – last article or podcast within the past two years.
Actionable education – real trade examples, data, or step-by-step tutorials.
Credibility – run by well-known traders, analysts, or financial firms.
U.S.-centric – most authors or companies are based in the United States.

Featured Options Trading Blogs

Financial Tech Wiz

Barchart – Options Trading Insights

URL: https://www.barchart.com/options
Type: Company (Financial data)

Barchart is one of the most comprehensive free options data resources available to retail traders. Their analysts combine real-time options flow with platform-native tools covering volatility surfaces, probability analytics, and strategy builders for verticals, earnings plays, and condors. If you want data-driven options education that you can immediately apply on a live platform, Barchart belongs in your rotation.

Benzinga Options (News & Education)

URL: https://www.benzinga.com/options
Type: Company (Financial media)

Benzinga covers unusual options activity faster than almost any other financial media outlet, making it a go-to source for traders who follow institutional flow. Beyond the news feed, their options education library covers calls, puts, and Greeks in a straightforward format accessible to traders at any level. It’s a strong combination of real-time intelligence and evergreen strategy content.

Option Omega Academy

URL: https://academy.optionomega.com/
Type: Company (Options backtesting)

Option Omega goes beyond a typical blog by pairing free and paid options courses with an actual backtesting platform built by real traders. You can study a strategy in the course content and then stress-test it across historical data on the same platform, which is a workflow most standalone blogs cannot offer. Use our link to save 50%!

Financial Tech Wiz Blog

URL: https://www.financialtechwiz.com/options-trading/
Type: Company (Trading and platform education)

Financial Tech Wiz teaches options trading strategies alongside reviews of the best tools and platforms available to retail traders. The site also offers a dedicated Trading Journal for tracking your options trades and an Options Profit Calculator for modeling potential outcomes before you enter a position.

Blue Collar Investor Blog

URL: https://thebluecollarinvestor.com/
Type: Individual (Options educator)

Alan Ellman has been teaching covered calls and cash-secured puts to retail investors for years, and his BCI System is one of the most clearly documented income options methodologies available for free. Every week he publishes stock screen lists, trade examples, and step-by-step exit strategy tutorials that make it easy to follow along with real positions. If selling premium for monthly income is your goal, Blue Collar Investor is essential reading.

Bullish Bears Trading Blog

URL: https://bullishbears.com/options-trading/
Type: Company (Trading community)

Founded by Lucien Bechard in 2016, Bullish Bears is built around the idea that trading education should be community-driven rather than lecture-based. Their blog covers options basics through intermediate strategies with a tone that genuinely meets newer traders where they are, without condescension. The community element is the real differentiator here, with active chat rooms and member interaction that most standalone blogs cannot replicate.

AlphaShark Trading Blog

URL: https://www.alphashark.com/
Type: Company (Trading educators)

Andrew Keene is a former CBOE market maker and regular CNBC and Bloomberg contributor who built AlphaShark around tracking unusual options activity at the institutional level. The core idea is that large, unusual options orders often precede major price moves, and Andrew’s scanner watches over 500 trades daily across every options exchange to identify that flow in real time. It’s a differentiated approach that goes well beyond typical strategy tutorials.

Cabot Options Institute

URL: https://www.cabotwealth.com/daily/options-trading
Type: Company (Financial publisher)

Cabot’s options coverage, led by analyst Jacob Mintz, focuses on conservative income strategies including covered calls, cash-secured puts, and earnings-driven spreads. Posts include clear entry and exit parameters alongside risk management notes, which makes their content actionable rather than purely theoretical. Cabot has been publishing financial research since 1970, and that editorial discipline shows in the consistency of their options content.

Cboe Options Institute Blog

URL: https://www.cboe.com/optionsinstitute/
Type: Company (Exchange)

The Cboe is the exchange that invented index options and listed the first VIX futures, so their educational content carries a level of authority no independent blog can match. The Options Institute publishes deep dives on VIX methodology, S&P 500 options mechanics, and foundational concepts that every serious options trader should understand. If you want to understand how options markets actually work at a structural level, start here.

Dorian Trader Blog

URL: https://doriantrader.com/blog
Type: Company (Trading education)

Dorian Trader focuses on systematic, rules-based trading with a particular emphasis on 0-DTE strategies and the tax side of active options trading, a topic most blogs completely ignore. Articles are concise and practical, with a mentoring program available for traders who want to go deeper. The tax optimization content alone makes this a valuable resource for active traders who realize too late that their gains are being eaten by short-term rates.

Dragonfly Capital

URL: https://dragonflycap.com
Type: Individual (Market analyst)

Greg Harmon takes a distinctive approach by combining rigorous technical chart analysis with options overlays, showing readers how calls, puts, and condors can be applied directly to classic chart setups. Most options blogs teach strategy in isolation from price action, so the integration of TA and derivatives here is genuinely useful for traders who want to understand when and why to use a particular options structure. Greg’s background as a portfolio manager gives his risk framing a professional-grade perspective.

Explosive Options Blog

URL: https://explosiveoptions.net/blog
Type: Individual (Options trader)

Bob Lang delivers directional options plays backed by technical analysis, with a focus on making the risk/reward picture clear through visual P&L diagrams. His approach is well suited to active swing traders who want to understand not just which options to buy, but how the position behaves across different price scenarios. Bob is also a contributor to major financial media outlets, which speaks to the quality of his market analysis.

Interactive Brokers Traders’ Insight

URL: https://ibkr.com/insights
Type: Company (Brokerage)

Interactive Brokers’ content arm publishes market microstructure and volatility commentary from experienced analysts including Steve Sosnick, whose options market expertise is well regarded across the industry. The coverage spans equities, options, futures, and macro, making it a useful resource for multi-asset traders who want options perspectives embedded in a broader market context. The depth here reflects IBKR’s institutional client base.

Locke In Your Success Blog

URL: https://lockeinyoursuccess.com/blog
Type: Individual (Options coach)

John Locke developed the M3 butterfly and bearish butterfly strategies over years of live trading, iterating on each design through real market conditions rather than backtests alone. His blog documents the trade logic and weekly market updates behind these non-directional income systems in significant detail, which is rare for a site of this type. If you’re serious about high-probability, non-directional income trading, John’s work is some of the most thoroughly documented methodology available to retail traders.

Luckbox Magazine

URL: https://luckboxmagazine.com
Type: Company (Financial magazine)

Luckbox is the editorial magazine arm of tastytrade, covering earnings trades, probability-based spreads, and macro volatility themes with a voice that actually makes options content enjoyable to read. It’s the only options publication that genuinely feels like a magazine rather than a tutorial dump, which makes it accessible to traders who might bounce off drier educational formats. The tastytrade data underpinning a lot of their content gives it a rigor that matches the quality of the writing.

Market Rebellion – Options News

URL: https://marketrebellion.com/news
Type: Company (Trading community)

Jon and Pete Najarian built careers on the CBOE floor trading options and spotting unusual activity before major moves, and Market Rebellion is built on that same institutional flow-reading framework. Their content spotlights unusual option sweeps alongside chart analysis, giving retail traders a window into the kind of positional intelligence that was previously only accessible to floor traders. For traders who want to follow smart money rather than react to headlines, this is one of the best free resources available.

Market Taker Mentoring Blog

URL: https://markettaker.com
Type: Company (Options mentoring)

Dan Passarelli is a former CBOE market maker who now teaches options through a mentoring-focused approach centered on building genuine trader confidence rather than just delivering information. His blog covers everything from the basics of calls and puts through complex spread structures, with a consistency and clarity that reflects years of explaining these concepts to real students. Dan also fields reader questions publicly, which gives the blog a useful Q&A dimension most competitors lack.

My Trader’s Journal

URL: https://mytradersjournal.com/stock-options
Type: Individual (Private trader)

Alex documents his real options trades in real time, including positions that go against him, which is the kind of transparency that’s almost nonexistent in the options education space. The blog focuses primarily on covered calls, naked puts, and spreads traded on high-quality stocks, with honest post-mortems when trades don’t go as planned. If you learn better from watching someone navigate real positions than from theoretical tutorials, My Trader’s Journal is one of the most useful reads in this list.

Option Alpha Blog

URL: https://optionalpha.com/blog
Type: Company (Options platform)

Kirk Du Plessis built Option Alpha into one of the largest options education libraries on the internet, covering everything from beginner strategy guides through zero-code bot building for automated income trading. The platform’s approach to turning manual income strategies into systematic, automatable playbooks is years ahead of where most options education sits. Whether you want to start with the free tutorials or go deep into automated trading, Option Alpha is one of the best starting points available.

Option Millionaires

URL: https://www.optionmillionaires.com/category/general-option-tips/
Type: Individual (Trading community)

Option Millionaires is built around a community of active options traders sharing real-time ideas, with a focus on momentum plays and high-conviction directional trades. The tone is candid and community-driven, which means you get unfiltered trader perspectives rather than polished educational content. It’s a good complement to more methodical education resources for traders who also want raw, community-sourced trade ideas.

Option Pit Blog

URL: https://optionpit.com/
Type: Company (Options education)

Mark Sebastian traded options on the CBOE floor for years and runs Option Pit with a focus that most retail education sites barely touch: volatility as a tradeable asset in its own right. His content covers VIX structure, term structure, volatility risk premium, and professional vol trading tactics that are directly informed by his time as a market maker. If you want to move beyond basic strategy into actually understanding how volatility works and how to trade it, Option Pit is the place to go.

Option Samurai Blog

URL: https://optionsamurai.com/blog/
Type: Company (Options software)

Option Samurai’s blog is built around their scanner-driven platform, showing traders how to systematically screen for high-probability iron condors, earnings plays, and spread setups using real options data. Rather than presenting strategies in the abstract, each post walks through how to find specific types of trades using quantitative filters, which is a more actionable format than most options blogs offer. It’s particularly useful for traders who want a repeatable, data-driven process for identifying setups.

Option Strategist Blog

URL: https://optionstrategist.com/blog
Type: Company (Advisory firm)

Lawrence McMillan wrote Options as a Strategic Investment, which is on the shelf of virtually every serious options trader, and has been publishing the Option Strategist newsletter since long before most current options blogs existed. His analytical work covers put/call ratios, volatility forecasting, breadth indicators, and calendar spread strategies at a level of rigor that reflects decades of professional options trading. For traders who want to understand the quantitative side of timing options trades, McMillan’s work is foundational.

OptionsANIMAL Blog

URL: https://optionstrategiesinsider.com/blog
Type: Company (Options education)

OptionsANIMAL offers a structured, course-based approach to options education taught by a team of veteran instructors, covering the full range from beginner fundamentals through advanced spread strategies. The curriculum format means you build knowledge sequentially rather than picking up disconnected tips, which is a more effective way to develop real trading competence. Their community and live coaching elements reinforce the coursework in a way a standalone blog cannot.

Options Trading IQ Blog

URL: https://optionstradingiq.com/blog
Type: Individual (Options educator)

Gavin McMaster has published one of the most extensive collections of backtested, data-backed options tutorials available from any individual blogger, covering iron condors, butterflies, calendars, and diagonal spreads with a consistently conservative, income-focused perspective. His posts include entry and exit rules, historical performance data, and risk parameters that make each strategy immediately testable. Gavin also contributes to Barchart and Nasdaq’s editorial platforms, which reflects the quality and reach of his work.

OptionsPlay Blog

URL: https://www.optionsplay.com/education
Type: Company (Options tool/education)

Tony Zhang and the OptionsPlay team bridge options strategy education with a visual platform that lets traders model positions interactively rather than just reading about them. Weekly strategy walk-throughs cover the wheel strategy, covered calls, and directional spreads with the kind of visual clarity that makes complex payoff diagrams actually interpretable. Tony is also a regular contributor to TD Ameritrade’s education platforms, lending credibility to the content.

Opinicus Holdings – Options Blog

URL: https://opinicusholdings.com/options-trading-blog
Type: Company (Trading education)

Opinicus Holdings publishes research-driven options content with a focus on 0-DTE risk, unusual flow interpretation, and index-option market structure. The posts are more quantitative than most retail-facing options blogs, which makes the site a strong read for traders who want data and analysis rather than basic tutorials. Their focus on understanding how institutional positioning affects index options is particularly useful for traders who regularly work with SPX or SPY options.

Options-Intelligence Blog

URL: https://options-intelligence.com/blog/
Type: Company (Advisory service)

Options-Intelligence publishes regular breakdowns of their trade alert performance alongside educational content explaining the signals and logic behind each recommendation. The transparency around actual trade results is more valuable than most advisory services offer, and it lets prospective subscribers evaluate the quality of the service before committing. For traders who want to study a high-probability signal-based approach alongside their own analysis, the blog provides solid reference material.

ORATS Blog

URL: https://orats.com/blog
Type: Company (Analytics firm)

ORATS, run by Matt Amberson, publishes some of the most rigorous quantitative options research available to retail traders, including backtests across hundreds of millions of strategy variations using institutional-grade historical data. Their blog covers volatility surface analysis, strategy edge measurement, and options pricing anomalies at a level of depth that most quant-focused hedge funds would respect. If you’re building a systematic options approach and want the data to back it up, ORATS is an essential resource.

Phil’s Stock World

URL: https://philstockworld.com
Type: Individual (Investor/analyst)

Phil Davis publishes daily macro commentary alongside hedged options spread ideas from a contrarian perspective, providing both the market context and the specific trade structure in a single post. The daily cadence builds a running narrative of how macro conditions are evolving and how to position options around them, which is more useful than isolated trade ideas without context. Phil’s long-form, opinionated style makes the blog genuinely enjoyable to read compared to more clinical options content.

Schaeffer’s Investment Research

URL: https://schaeffersresearch.com
Type: Company (Research firm)

Bernie Schaeffer founded his research firm in 1981 and built it around a contrarian sentiment methodology that combines put/call ratios, options flow statistics, and technical signals to identify high-probability trade setups before the crowd moves. Their blog publishes trade ideas, market commentary, and educational content that reflects decades of institutional options research. For traders who want a data-driven, contrarian framework for timing options trades, Schaeffer’s is one of the most established names in the space.

Simpler Trading Blog

URL: https://simplertrading.com/blog
Type: Company (Trading educators)

John Carter and the Simpler Trading team cover options, futures, and equities with a multi-timeframe approach that shows how volatility events and technical setups interact across time horizons. The blog reflects a live trading room environment, so content is tied directly to real market conditions rather than textbook examples. Simpler Trading has grown into one of the larger retail trading education brands, and the depth of their educator roster shows in the variety and quality of what they publish.

Six Figure Investing

URL: https://www.sixfigureinvesting.com/
Type: Individual (Private investor)

Six Figure Investing covers VIX exchange-traded products, volatility hedging strategies, and options nuances that most retail-focused blogs never address. The depth of the VIX ETP analysis here is genuinely rare and valuable for traders who want to understand how volatility products behave across different market regimes. If you trade VXX, UVXY, or SVXY, or want to hedge a portfolio with options, this is one of the few blogs that goes deep enough to actually be useful.

Smart Option Seller Blog

URL: https://www.smartoptionseller.com/
Type: Individual (Options trader)

Lee Lowell is a former NYMEX floor trader who now focuses exclusively on selling puts as a conservative income strategy, and his blog reflects the discipline and risk-first mindset that comes from years of professional trading. The content is specific, repeatable, and focused: sell puts on quality stocks, manage risk carefully, collect premium consistently. For traders who want a focused, no-noise implementation of put selling as an income strategy, Smart Option Seller is one of the cleaner resources in the space.

SMB Training Blog (Options)

URL: https://www.smbtraining.com/blog/
Type: Company (Prop trading firm)

SMB Capital is a New York-based proprietary trading firm that publishes options education through their Options Tribe program, run by Seth Freudberg. The content reflects actual prop desk experience, covering non-directional income trades, risk management under real capital constraints, and case studies from professional traders rather than retail educators. The professional-grade perspective is the main draw here, and it’s something very few publicly accessible options blogs can match.

Spintwig – Options Backtesting

URL: https://spintwig.com/blog
Type: Individual (Quant trader)

Mitch at Spintwig systematically backtests hundreds of options strategies across years of historical data and publishes the results publicly, including the code, the methodology, and the full performance breakdown. Strategies covered include the wheel, 45-DTE spreads, short strangles, and many more, all tested with real transaction cost assumptions rather than theoretical inputs. If you’re building a systematic options approach and want to know what actually worked historically before risking capital, Spintwig is one of the most valuable free resources on the internet.

SpotGamma Blog

URL: https://spotgamma.com/blog/
Type: Company (Analytics platform)

Brent Kochuba founded SpotGamma in 2020 and effectively coined the term “gamma exposure” as a trading concept for retail markets, showing how options dealer hedging flows create predictable price behavior around key strikes and expirations. His twice-daily Founder’s Notes and blog posts explain market structure in plain English, making concepts like GEX, dealer positioning, and volatility pinning accessible to traders without a quantitative finance background. SpotGamma has become required reading for options traders who want to understand the mechanics driving intraday price action.

SteadyOptions Blog

URL: https://steadyoptions.com/articles/
Type: Company (Advisory service)

Kim Klaiman runs SteadyOptions with a focus on non-directional income strategies, specifically pre-earnings straddles, iron condors, calendars, and strangles, all extensively backtested and traded with real money through his advisory service. The educational articles include real performance case studies that show how the strategies behave across different market conditions, which gives them a credibility that hypothetical tutorials lack. Kim’s philosophy is that consistent profitability comes from diversifying across multiple non-directional strategies rather than betting on any single approach.

SJ Options Blog

URL: http://sjoptions.com/tour/options-trading-blog/
Type: Company (Options education)

SJ Options publishes advanced options content covering portfolio margin mechanics, higher-order Greeks like vanna and charm, and kurtosis-based strategies that go well beyond what most education sites cover. The content is aimed squarely at experienced traders who have already mastered the basics and want to understand how professional options traders think about risk at a structural level. If you’re ready to move beyond condors and spreads into a more sophisticated framework for options portfolio management, SJ Options is worth studying.

tastytrade (tastylive) Blog

URL: https://www.tastylive.com/news-insights
Type: Company (Brokerage/media)

Tom Sosnoff built tastytrade into one of the most influential retail options platforms in the world, underpinned by decades of proprietary research on probability-based trading, position sizing, and options premium mechanics. Their daily content covers 0-DTE plays, short premium strategies, and macro volatility themes, all delivered with a conversational style that makes technically dense material genuinely engaging. The volume and quality of freely available tastytrade research is simply unmatched in the retail options space.

Terry’s Tips Blog

URL: https://www.terrystips.com/blog/
Type: Individual (Options newsletter)

Terry Allen has been running real-money options portfolios publicly since 2001, which gives him a track record across multiple market cycles that almost no other options advisory can point to. His specialty is calendar spreads, capitalizing on the different rates of time decay between short-term and long-term options, and he walks through the logic and adjustments on each portfolio trade in detail. The combination of longevity, real capital, and systematic documentation makes Terry’s Tips one of the most credible long-running options resources available.

TheoTrade Blog

URL: https://theotrade.com/home/blog/
Type: Company (Trading educators)

TheoTrade combines volatility-focused options education with technical analysis in a way most options blogs don’t attempt, covering high-probability spreads, volatility events, and the market structure context that drives option pricing. Don Kaufman and the TheoTrade team publish video walk-throughs alongside written content, which is useful for traders who absorb complex concepts better visually. The dual focus on volatility and technical setups fills a real gap between purely mechanical income trading education and purely technical analysis content.

Trading Options for Cashflow

URL: https://www.tradingoptionscashflow.com/
Type: Individual (Retail trader)

Trading Options for Cashflow is focused specifically on generating consistent monthly income through options selling, primarily short puts and covered calls, with a community forum where members track and discuss their positions. The cashflow framing makes the site directly useful for income investors who want to use options as a yield-enhancement tool rather than for speculation. The combination of practical strategy content and an active community makes it more engaging than a solo blogger publishing tutorials in isolation.

Trading Trainer

URL: https://www.tradingtrainer.com/all-posts/
Type: Company (Trading education)

A.J. Brown has been teaching covered calls and options risk management since 2003, making Trading Trainer one of the longer-running independent options education sites in this list. The longevity matters because the methodology has been refined through multiple market environments, including 2008, 2020, and everything in between. A.J.’s approachable teaching style and emphasis on risk-first thinking make the site a strong resource for investors who are new to options but serious about understanding what they’re doing.

Traders Log

URL: https://www.traderslog.com/category/options
Type: Company (Financial media)

Traders Log has been publishing options and futures education content since 2007, covering technical analysis, strategy breakdowns, and market commentary across multiple asset classes. The longevity of the site means there is a substantial archive of high-quality educational material spanning many market cycles, which is useful for traders who want historical context alongside current content. It functions as a solid one-stop resource for multi-asset traders who want options perspectives alongside futures and equities coverage.

Unusual Whales (Options News)

URL: https://unusualwhales.com/option-strategies
Type: Company (Market data platform)

Unusual Whales has become one of the most widely followed options flow and dark pool tracking platforms among retail traders, surfacing large and unusual options orders that often precede significant price moves. Beyond the raw flow data, their options education section explains how to interpret different types of unusual activity, how to distinguish informed flow from hedging or noise, and how to incorporate flow signals into a broader trading process. The combination of real-time data and practical education makes it a uniquely valuable resource.

Final Thoughts

Whether you’re hunting for daily trade ideas, deep-dive quantitative research, or step-by-step beginner guides, the blogs above will keep your options knowledge sharp. Bookmark a few, subscribe to their newsletters, and let their expertise shorten your learning curve. Then get back to placing smarter, more profitable trades.